THE HALL OF THE KINGS OF BOHEMIA
Don Luis interrupted himself after delivering his opening sentence and
stood enjoying the effect produced. Captain Belval, who knew his friend,
was laughing heartily. Stephane continued to look anxious. All's Well
had not budged.
Don Luis continued:
"Let me begin by confessing, ladies and gentlemen, that my object in
fixing my date so precisely was to some extent to stagger you. In
reality I could not tell you within a few centuries the exact date of
the scene which I shall have the honour of describing to you. But what I
can guarantee is that it is laid in that country of Europe which to-day
we call Bohemia and at the spot where the little industrial town of
Joachimsthal now stands. That, I hope, is fairly circumstantial. Well,
on the morning of the day when my story begins, there was great
excitement among one of those Celtic tribes which had settled a century
or two earlier between the banks of the Danube and the sources of the
Elbe, amidst the Hyrcanian forests. The warriors, assisted by their
wives, were striking their tents, collecting the sacred axes, the bows
and arrows, gathering up the pottery, the bronze and tin implements,
loading the horses and the oxen.
"The chiefs were here, there and everywhere, attending to the smallest
details. There was neither tumult nor disorder. They started early in
the direction of a tributary of the Elbe, the Eger, which they reached
towards the end of the day. Here boats were waiting, guarded by a
hundred of the picked warriors who had been sent ahead. One of these
boats was conspicuous for its size and the richness of its decoration. A
long yellow cloth was stretched from side to side. The chief of chiefs,
the King, if you prefer, climbed on the stern thwart and made a speech
which I will spare you, because I do not wish to shorten my own, but
which may be summed up as follows: the tribe was emigrating to escape
the cupidity of the neighbouring populations. It is always sad to leave
the places where one has dwelt. But it made no difference to the men of
the tribe, because they were carrying with them their most valuable
possession, the sacred inheritance of their ancestors, the divinity that
protected them and made them formidable and great among the greatest, in
short, the stone that covered the tomb of their kings.
"And the chief of chiefs, with a solemn gesture, drew the yellow cloth
and revealed a block of granite in the shape of a slab about two yards
by one, granular in appearance and dark in colour, with a few glittering
scales gleaming in its substance.
"There was a single shout raised by the crowd of men and women; and all,
with outstretched arms, fell flat on their faces in the dust.
"Then the chief of chiefs took up a metal sceptre with a jewelled
handle, which lay on the block of granite, brandished it on high and
spoke:
"'The all-powerful staff shall not leave my hand until the miraculous
stone is in a place of safety. The all-powerful staff is born of the
miraculous stone. It also contains the fire of heaven, which gives life
or death. While the miraculous stone was the tomb of my forefathers, the
all-powerful staff never left their hands on days of disaster or of
victory. May the fire of heaven lead us! May the Sun-god light our way!'
"He spoke: and the whole tribe set out upon its journey."
Don Luis struck an attitude and repeated, in a self-satisfied tone:
"He spoke: and the whole tribe set out upon its journey."
Patrice Belval was greatly amused; and Stephane, infected by his
hilarity, began to feel more cheerful. But Don Luis now addressed his
remarks to them:
"There's nothing to laugh at! All this is very serious. It's not a story
for children who believe in conjuring tricks and sleight of hand, but a
real history, all the details of which will, as you shall see, give rise
to precise, natural and, in a sense, scientific explanations. Yes,
ladies and gentlemen, scientific: I am not afraid of the word. We are
here on scientific ground; and Vorski himself will regret his cynical
merriment."
Don Luis took a second sip of water and continued:
"For weeks and months the tribe followed the course of the Elbe; and one
evening, on the stroke of half-past nine, reached the sea-board, in the
country which afterwards became the country of the Frisians. It
remained there for weeks and months, without finding the requisite
security. It therefore determined upon a fresh exodus.
"This time it was a naval exodus. Thirty boats put out to sea--observe
this number thirty, which was that of the families composing the
tribe--and for weeks and months they wandered from shore to shore,
settling first in Scandinavia, next among the Saxons, driven off,
putting to sea again and continuing their voyage. And I assure you it
was really a strange, moving, impressive sight to see this vagrant tribe
dragging in its wake the tombstone of its kings and seeking a safe,
inaccessible and final refuge in which to conceal its idol, protect it
from the attack of its enemies, celebrate its worship and employ it to
consolidate the tribal power.
"The last stage was Ireland; and it was here that, one day, after they
had dwelt in the green isle for half a century or perhaps a century,
after their manners had acquired a certain softening by contact with
nations which were already less barbarous, the grandson or
great-grandson of the great chief, himself a great chief, received one
of the emissaries whom he maintained in the neighbouring countries. This
one came from the continent. He had discovered the miraculous refuge. It
was an almost unapproachable island, protected by thirty rocks and
having thirty granite monuments to guard it.
"Thirty! The fateful number! It was an obvious summons and command from
the mysterious deities. The thirty galleys were launched once more and
the expedition set forth.
"It succeeded. They took the island by assault. The natives they simply
exterminated. The tribe settled down; and the tombstone of the Kings of
Bohemia was installed . . . in the very place which it occupies to-day
and which I showed to our friend Vorski. Here I must interpolate a few
historical data of the greatest significance. I will be brief."
Adopting a professorial tone, Don Luis explained:
"The island of Sarek, like all France and all the western part of
Europe, had been inhabited for thousands of years by a race known as the
Liguri, the direct descendants of the cave-dwellers part of whose
manners and customs they had retained. They were mighty builders, those
Liguri, who, in the neolithic period, perhaps under the influence of the
great civilizations of the east, had erected their huge blocks of
granite and built their colossal funeral chambers.
"It was here that our tribe found and made great use of a system of
caves and natural crypts adapted by the patient hand of man and of a
cluster of enormous monuments which struck the mystic and superstitious
imagination of the Celts.
"We find therefore that, after the first or wandering phase, there
begins for the God-Stone a period of rest and worship which we will call
the Druidical period. It lasted for a thousand or fifteen hundred years.
The tribe became mingled with the neighbouring tribes and probably lived
under the protection of some Breton king. But, little by little, the
ascendancy had passed from the chiefs to the priests; and these priests,
that is to say, the Druids, assumed an authority which increased in the
course of the generations that followed.
"They owed this authority, beyond all doubt, to the miraculous stone.
True, they were the priests of a religion accepted by all and also the
instructors of Gallic childhood (it seems certain, incidentally, that
the cells under the Black Heath were those of a Druid convent, or rather
a sort of university); true, in obedience to the practices of the time,
they presided over human sacrifices and ordained the gathering of the
mistletoe, the vervain and all the magic herbs; but, before all, in the
island of Sarek, they were the guardians and the possessors of the stone
which gave life or death. Placed above the hall of the underground
sacrifices, it was at that time undoubtedly visible in the open air; and
I have every reason to believe that the Fairies' Dolmen, which we now
see here, then stood in the place known as the Calvary of the Flowers
and sheltered the God-Stone. It was there that ailing and crippled
persons and sickly children were laid to recover their health and
strength. It was on the sacred slab that barren women became fruitful,
on the sacred slab that old men felt their energies revive.
"In my eyes it dominates the whole of the legendary and fabled past of
Brittany. It is the radiating centre of all the superstitions, all the
beliefs, all the fears and hopes of the country. By virtue of the stone
or of the magic sceptre which the archdruid wielded and with which he
burnt men's flesh or healed their sores at will, we see the beautiful
tales of romance springing spontaneously into being, tales of the
knights of the Round Table, tales of Merlin the wizard. The stone is at
the bottom of every mystery, at the heart of every symbol. It is
darkness and light in one, the great riddle and the great explanation."
Don Luis uttered these last words with a certain exaltation. He smiled:
"Don't let yourself be carried away, Vorski. We'll keep our enthusiasm
for the narrative of your crimes. For the moment, we are at the climax
of the Druidical period, a period which lasted far beyond the Druids
through long centuries during which, after the Druids had gone, the
miraculous stone was exploited by the sorcerers and soothsayers. And
thus we come gradually to the third period, the religious period, that
is to say, actually to the progressive decline of all that constituted
the glory of Sarek: pilgrimages, commemorative festivals and so forth.
"The Church in fact was unable to put up with that crude fetish-worship.
As soon as she was strong enough, she was bound to fight against the
block of granite which attracted so many believers and perpetuated so
hateful a religion. The fight was an unequal one; and the past
succumbed. The dolmen was moved to where we stand, the slab of the kings
of Bohemia was buried under a layer of earth and a Calvary rose at the
very spot where the sacrilegious miracles were once wrought.
"And, over and above that, there was the great oblivion!
"Let me explain. The practices were forgotten. The rites were forgotten
and all that constituted the history of a vanished cult. But the
God-Stone was not forgotten. Men no longer knew where it was. In time
they even no longer knew what it was. But they never ceased to speak of
and believe in the existence of something which they called the
God-Stone. From mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, they
handed down on to one another fabulous and terrible stories, which
became farther and farther removed from reality, which formed a more and
more vague and, for that matter, a more and more frightful legend, but
which kept alive in their imaginations the recollection of the God-Stone
and, above all, its name.
"This persistence of an idea in men's memories, this survival of a fact
in the annals of a country had the logical result that, from time to
time, some enquiring person would try to reconstruct the prodigious
truth. Two of these enquiring persons, Brother Thomas, a member of the
Benedictine Order, who lived in the middle of the fifteenth century, and
the man Maguennoc, in our own time, played an important part. Brother
Thomas was a poet and an illuminator about whom we possess not many
details, a very bad poet, to judge by his verses, but as an illuminator
ingenuous and not devoid of talent. He left a sort of missal in which he
related his life at Sarek Abbey and drew the thirty dolmens of the
island, the whole accompanied by instances, religious quotations and
predictions after the manner of Nostradamus. It was this missal,
discovered by Maguennoc aforesaid, that contained the famous page with
the crucified women and the prophecy relating to Sarek; it was this
missal that I myself found and consulted last night in Maguennoc's
bedroom.
"He was an odd person, this Maguennoc, a belated descendant of the
sorcerers of old; and I strongly suspect him of playing the ghost on
more than one occasion. You may be sure that the white-robed,
white-bearded Druid whom people declared that they had seen on the sixth
day of the moon, gathering the mistletoe, was none other than Maguennoc.
He too knew all about the good old recipes, the healing herbs, the way
to work up the soil so as to make it yield enormous flowers. One thing
is certain, that he explored the mortuary crypts and the hall of the
sacrifices, that it was he who purloined the magic stone contained in
the knob of the sceptre and that he used to enter these crypts by the
opening through which we have just come, in the middle of the Postern
path, of which he was obliged each time to replace the screen of stones
and pebbles. It was he also who gave M. d'Hergemont the page from the
missal. Whether he confided the result of his last explorations to him
and how much exactly M. d'Hergemont knew does not matter now. Another
figure looms into sight, one who is henceforth the embodiment of the
whole affair and claims all our attention, an emissary dispatched by
fate to solve the riddle of the centuries, to carry out the orders of
the mysterious powers and to pocket the God-Stone. I am speaking of
Vorski."
Don Luis swallowed his third glass of water and, beckoning to the
accomplice, said:
"Otto, you had better give him a drink, if he's thirsty. Are you
thirsty, Vorski?"
Vorski on his tree seemed exhausted, incapable of further effort or
resistance. Stephane and Patrice once more intervened on his behalf,
fearing an immediate consummation.
"Not at all, not at all!" cried Don Luis. "He's all right and he'll hold
out until I've finished my speech, if it were only because he wants to
know. You're tremendously interested, aren't you, Vorski?"
"Robber! Murderer!" spluttered the wretched man.
"Splendid! So you still refuse to tell us where Francois is hidden?"
"Murderer! Highwayman!"
"Then stay where you are, old chap. As you please. There's nothing
better for the health than a little suffering. Besides, you have caused
so much suffering to others, you dirty scum!"
Don Luis uttered these words harshly and in accents of anger which one
would hardly have expected from a man who had already beheld so many
crimes and battled with so many criminals. But then this last one was
out of all proportion.
Don Luis continued:
"About thirty-five years ago, a very beautiful woman, who came from
Bohemia but who was of Hungarian descent, visited the watering-places
that swarm around the Bavarian lakes and soon achieved a great
reputation as a fortune-teller palmist, seer and medium. She attracted
the attention of King Louis II, Wagner's friend, the man who built
Bayreuth, the crowned mad-man famed for his extravagant fancies. The
intimacy between the king and the clairvoyant lasted for some years. It
was a violent, restless intimacy, interrupted by the frequent whims of
the king; and it ended tragically on the mysterious evening when Louis
of Bavaria threw himself out of his boat into the Starnbergersee. Was it
really, as the official version stated, suicide following on a fit of
madness? Or was it a case of murder, as some have held? Why suicide?
Why murder? These are questions that have never been answered. But one
fact remains: the Bohemian woman was in the boat with Louis II and next
day was escorted to the frontier and expelled from the country after her
money and jewellery had been taken from her.
"She brought back with her from this adventure a young monster, four
years old, Alex Vorski by name, which young monster lived with his
mother near the village of Joachimsthal in Bohemia. Here, in course of
time, she instructed him in all the practices of hypnotic suggestion,
extralucidity and trickery. Endowed with a character of unexampled
violence but a very weak intellect, a prey to hallucinations and
nightmares, believing in spells, in predictions, in dreams, in occult
powers, he took legends for history and falsehoods for reality. One of
the numerous legends of the mountains in particular had impressed his
imagination: it was the one that describes the fabulous power of a stone
which, in the dim recesses of the past, was carried away by evil genii
and which was one day to be brought back by the son of a king. The
peasants still show the cavity left by the stone in the side of a hill.
"'The king's son is yourself,' his mother used to say. 'And, if you find
the missing stone, you will escape the dagger that threatens you and
will yourself become a king.'
"This ridiculous prophecy and another, no less fantastic, in which the
Bohemian woman announced that her son's wife would perish on the cross
and that he himself would die by the hand of a friend, were among those
which exercised the most direct influence on Vorski when the fateful
hour struck. And I will go straight on to this fateful hour, without
saying any more of what our conversations of yesterday and last night
revealed to the three of us or of what we have been able to reconstruct.
There is no reason to repeat in full the story which you, Stephane, told
Veronique d'Hergemont in your cell. There is no need to inform you,
Patrice, you, Vorski, or you, All's Well, of events with which you are
familiar, such as your marriage, Vorski, or rather your two marriages,
first with Elfride and next with Veronique d'Hergemont, the kidnapping
of Francois by his grandfather, the disappearance of Veronique, the
searches which you set on foot to find her, your conduct at the outbreak
of the war and your life in the internment-camps. These are mere trifles
besides the events which are on the point of taking place. We have
cleared up the history of the God-Stone. It is the modern adventure,
which you, Vorski, have woven around the God-Stone, that we are now
about to unravel.
"In the beginning it appears like this: Vorski is imprisoned in an
internment-camp near Pontivy in Brittany. He no longer calls himself
Vorski, but Lauterbach. Fifteen months before, after a first escape and
at the moment when the court martial was about to sentence him to death
as a spy, he escaped again, spent some time in the Forest of
Fontainebleau, there found one of his former servants, a man called
Lauterbach, a German like himself and like himself an escaped prisoner,
killed him, dressed the body in his clothes and made the face up in such
a way as to give him the appearance of his murderer, Vorski. The
military police were taken in and had the sham Vorski buried at
Fontainebleau. As for the real Vorski, he had the bad luck to be
arrested once more, under his new name of Lauterbach, and to be interned
in the camp at Pontivy.
"So much for Vorski. On the other hand, Elfride, his first wife, the
formidable accomplice in all his crimes and herself a German--I have
some particulars about her and their past life in common which are of no
importance and need not be mentioned here--Elfride, I was saying, his
accomplice, was hidden with their son Raynold in the cells of Sarek. He
had left her there to spy on M. d'Hergemont and through him to ascertain
Veronique d'Hergemont's whereabouts. The reasons which prompted the
wretched woman's actions I do not know. It may have been blind devotion,
fear of Vorski, an instinctive love of evil-doing, hatred of the rival
who supplanted her. It doesn't matter. She has suffered the most
terrible punishment. Let us speak only of the part she played, without
seeking to understand how she had the courage to live for three years
underground, never going out except at night, stealing food for herself
and her son and patiently awaiting the day when she could serve and save
her lord and master.
"I am also ignorant of the series of events that enabled her to take
action, nor do I know how Vorski and Elfride managed to communicate. But
what I know most positively is that Vorski's escape was long and
carefully prepared by his first wife. Every detail arranged. Every
precaution was taken. On the fourteenth of September of last year,
Vorski escaped, taking with him the two accomplices with whom he had
made friends during his captivity and whom he had, so to speak,
enrolled: the Otto and Conrad whom you know of.
"It was an easy journey. At every cross-roads, an arrow, accompanied by
a number, one of a series, and surmounted by the initials 'V. d'H.,'
which initials were evidently selected by Vorski, pointed out the road
which he was to follow. At intervals, in a deserted cabin, some
provisions were hidden under a stone or in a truss of hay. The way led
through Guemene, Le Faouet and Rosporden and ended on the beach at
Beg-Meil.
"Here Elfride and Raynold came by night to fetch the three fugitives in
Honorine's motor-boat and to land them near the Druid cells under the
Black Heath. They clambered up. Their lodgings were ready for them and,
as you have seen, were fairly comfortable. The winter passed; and
Vorski's plan, which as yet was very vague, became more precisely
outlined from day to day.
"Strange to say, at the time of his first visit to Sarek, before the
war, he had not heard of the secret of the island. It was Elfride who
told him the legend of the God-Stone in the letters which she wrote to
him at Pontivy. You can imagine the effect produced by this revelation
on a man like Vorski. The God-Stone was bound to be the miraculous stone
wrested from the soil of his native land, the stone which was to be
discovered by the son of a king and which, from that time onward, would
give him power and royalty. Everything that he learnt later confirmed
his conviction. But the great fact that dominates his subterranean life
at Sarek was the discovery of Brother Thomas' prophecy in the course of
the last month. Fragments of this prophecy were lingering on every hand,
which he was able to pick up by listening to the conversations of the
fisherfolk in the evenings, lurking under the windows of the cottages or
on the roofs of the barns. Within mortal memory, the people of Sarek
have always feared some terrible events, connected with the discovery
and the disappearance of the invisible stone. There was likewise always
a question of wrecks and of women crucified. Besides, Vorski was
acquainted with the inscription on the Fairies' Dolmen, about the thirty
victims destined for the thirty coffins, the martyrdom of the four
women, the God-Stone which gives life or death. What a number of
disturbing coincidences for a mind as weak as his!
"But the prophecy itself, found by Maguennoc in the illuminated missal,
constitutes the essential factor of the whole story. Remember that
Maguennoc had torn out the famous page and that M. d'Hergemont, who was
fond of drawing, had copied it several times and had unconsciously given
to the principal woman the features of his daughter Veronique. Vorski
became aware of the existence of the original and of one of the copies
when he saw Maguennoc one night looking at them by the light of his
lamp. Immediately, in the darkness, he contrived somehow to pencil in
his note-book the fifteen lines of this precious document. He now knew
and understood everything. He was dazzled by a blinding light. All the
scattered elements were gathered into a whole, forming a compact and
solid truth. There was no doubt possible: the prophecy concerned _him_!
And it was _his_ mission to realize it!
"This, I repeat, is the essence of the whole matter. From that moment,
Vorski's path was lighted by a beacon. He held in his hand Ariadne's
clue of thread. The prophecy represented to him an unimpeachable text.
It was one of the Tables of the Law. It was the Bible. And yet think of
the stupidity, of the unspeakable silliness of those fifteen lines
scribbled at a venture, with no other motive than rhyme! Not a phrase
showing a sign of inspiration! Not a spark, not a gleam! Not a trace of
the sacred madness that uplifted the Delphian pythoness or provoked the
delirious visions of a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel! Nothing! Syllables,
rhymes! Nothing! Less than nothing! But quite enough to enlighten the
gentle Vorski and to make him burn with all the enthusiasm of a
neophyte!
"Stephane, Patrice, listen to the prophecy of Brother Thomas. The
Superhun wrote it down on ten different pages of his note-book, so that
he might wear it ten times next to his skin and engrave it in the very
substance of his being. Here's one of the pages. Stephane, Patrice,
listen! Listen, O faithful Otto! And you yourself, Vorski, for the last
time listen to the doggerel of Brother Thomas! Listen as I read!
"In Sarek's isle, in year fourteen and three,
There will be shipwrecks, terrors, grief and crimes,
Death-chambers, arrows, poison there will be
And woe, four women crucified on tree!
For thirty coffins victims thirty times.
"Before his mother's eyes, Abel kills Cain.
The father then, coming forth of Almain,
A cruel prince, obeying destiny,
By thousand deaths and lingering agony,
His wedded wife one night of June hath slain.
"Fire and loud noise will issue from the earth
In secrecy where the great treasure lies
And man again will on the stone set eyes
Once stolen from wild men in byegone days
O'er the sea; the God-Stone which gives life or death."
Don Luis Perenna had begun to read in emphatic tones, bringing out the
imbecility of the words and the triteness of the rhythm. He ended in a
hollow voice, without resonance, which died away in an anguished
silence. The whole adventure appeared in all its horror.
He continued:
"You understand how the facts are linked together, don't you Stephane,
you who were one of the victims and who knew or know the others? So do
you, Patrice, don't you? In the fifteenth century, a poor monk, with a
disordered imagination and a brain haunted by infernal visions,
expresses his dreams in a prophecy which we will describe as bogus,
which rests on no serious data, which consists of details depending on
the exigencies of the rhyme or rhythm and which certainly, both in the
poet's mind and from the standpoint of originality, possesses no more
value than if the poet had drawn the words at random out of a bag. The
story of the God-Stone, the legends and traditions, none of all this
provides him with the least element of prophecy. The worthy man evolved
the prophecy from his own consciousness, not intending any harm and
simply to add a text of some sort to the margin of the devilish drawing
which he had so painstakingly illuminated. And he is so pleased with it
that he takes the trouble to take a pointed implement and engrave a few
lines of it on one of the stones of the Fairies' Dolmen.
"Well, four or five centuries later, the prophetic page falls into the
hands of a Superhun, a criminal lunatic, a madman eaten up with vanity.
What does the Superhun see in it? A diverting puerile fantasy? A
meaningless caprice? Not a bit of it! He regards it as a document of the
highest interest, one of those documents which the most Superhunnish of
his fellowcountrymen love to pore over, with this difference, that the
document to his mind possesses a miraculous origin. He looks upon it as
the Old and New Testament, the Scriptures which explain and expound the
Sarek law, the very gospel of the God-Stone. And this gospel designates
him, Vorski, him, the Superhun, as the Messiah appointed to execute the
decrees of Providence.
"To Vorski, there is no possibility of mistake. No doubt he enjoys the
business, because it is a matter of stealing wealth and power. But this
question occupies a secondary position. He is above all obeying the
mystic impulse of a race which believes itself to be marked out by
destiny and which flatters itself that it is always fulfilling missions,
a mission of regeneration as well as a mission of pillage, arson and
murder. And Vorski reads his mission set out in full in Brother Thomas'
prophecy. Brother Thomas says explicitly what has to be done and names
him, Vorski, in the plainest terms, as the man of destiny. Is he not a
king's son, in other words a 'prince of Almain?' Does he not come from
the country where the stone was stolen from the 'wild men o'er the sea?'
Has he not also a wife who is doomed, in the seer's prophecies, to the
torture of the cross? Has he not two sons, one gentle and gracious as
Abel, and the other wicked and uncontrolled as Cain?
"These proofs are enough for him. He now has his mobilization-papers,
his marching-orders in his pocket. The gods have indicated the objective
upon which he is to march; and he marches. True, there are a few living
people in his path. So much the better; it is all part of the programme.
For it is after all these living people have been killed and, moreover,
killed in the manner announced by Brother Thomas that the task will be
done, the God-Stone released and Vorski, the instrument of destiny,
crowned king. Therefore, let's turn up our sleeves, take our trusty
butcher's knife in hand, and get to work! Vorski will translate Brother
Thomas' nightmare into real life!"